Sunday, January 6, 2008

Well, I expected a hostile reaction from the Alberta Alliance in response to my most recent post, and the very reasonable requests contained therein.

The Alberta Alliance kook brigade showed up in both my comments and email. I let one kooky comment through, in order for you to experience a taste of what one has to put up with when doing adversarial blogging about Alberta's right wing parties. I fully expected this kind of thing to happen; it comes as no surprise. For obvious reasons, comments have now reverted to their default status.

The Alberta Alliance itself chose not to respond directly to my email, even though their CFO, Jane Morgan, recently went to all the trouble of photoshopping a little joke about my comments policy. So, I turned comments on, especially for her, and got no response, or, to be more accurate, no response in my comments.

The response I did receive came in the form of a complaint about yours truly filed with another website. I hold an account on scribd.com, otherwise known as the "youtube for documents". It allows members to publish, share, and discuss all sorts of written files. As this post indicates, I uploaded some completely accurate copies of publicly available Alberta Alliance documents, namely, a copy of the Alberta Alliance's 2006 constitution, and 2006 Policy Book. The Alberta Alliance is now asserting that this amounts to a copyright violation, and are demanding that scribd.com pull the files.

The Alberta Alliance's complaint can be read here. They are apparently quite proud of it. Notice how Jane Morgan has redacted the URLs, and cc'd the thing to the Party President, Randy Thorsteinson.

Ooooh, I'm getting scared.

How to respond?

Well, in my view, there is one potentially valid point in the complaint. If someone came across the documents without reading my post, wherein I state that both of these documents are dated, they may come to the conclusion that the documents are currently in effect. I am going to rename the documents, to clarify that they are no longer in effect.

I will not be pulling them, until I have had time to decide if there is any merit to this copyright business. If I decide a political party does have copyright over these kinds of documents, I will pull them. I can't imagine this is the case, but I don't honestly know.

If I decide that there is no merit to the copyright complaint, I will do my best to convince scribd.com to keep the documents up. However, given that they don't have a dog in this hunt, they may pull them anyhow, just to stop the whining.

Then things will get interesting.

Be advised that I have every intention of preserving my right to publish non-copyrighted political material from any and all sources.